Ancient Jew Review: The First Ten Years

The email arrived on November 22, 2014, and began:

            Hi this is Krista Dalton from twitter.

She continued: “I’m an editor for the ancientjewreview.com, a new web platform devoted to the study of ancient Judaism.”

I can’t remember if Krista and I had interacted on social media before then (and a quick search of the decaying ruins of Twitter/X doesn’t help), although we certainly would soon enough. Krista, then a graduate student at Columbia University (who, I will point out with some awe, was not yet ABD ten years ago) had noted the upcoming SBL panel commemorating 25 years of the Early Jewish Christian Relations group and wondered if I “or another member of [my] committee would want to write a short piece highlighting the aims of the group and an assessment of your panel.”

As it turns out, the very next morning (also the day of the Early Jewish Christian Relations retrospective panel) I had breakfast with another Columbia University graduate student, Nathan Schumer, who had reached out to suggest we meet to discuss our overlapping research interests. Nathan was one of the founding co-editors of Ancient Jew Review and told me about it over breakfast.

When I responded to Krista after SBL, I boldly proposed something more substantial than a “short piece” on our panel. What if the website posted the entirety of our panelists’ comments along with some supplementary documents (like the founding proposal of our group from 1989) perhaps with some other respondents? In essence, I was proposing a kind of “special issue” that could leverage the benefits of online publication: quick turnaround, flexible formatting possibilities (including images and tables), and the possibility of reaching a larger audience than traditional print publication. (That panel is still available here, although the possibility of additional respondents proved too cumbersome in the end.)

I didn’t realize at the time, of course, but I was helping this new website inaugurate one of its signature publication formats: the forum. Some subsequent fora, like mine, draw from conference panels; others comprise original online essays commissioned for the site focused on recent books or burgeoning topics in the field of ancient Mediterranean religions. If inadvertently encouraging AJR to host these high-quality fora were my only contribution to the study of ancient religions, dayenu.

About a month after our forum went online, Nathan Schumer emailed me on behalf of the three founding editors to invite me to join their advisory board (he mentioned my “internet savvy” which I think meant that, for a relatively old person, I posted too much on Twitter), a berth I have kept and cherished for the past decade. It has been a pleasure to watch this website grow, like the parable of the mustard seed, into the largest of internet trees in whose branches we can all find intellectual shelter. Although I cannot take credit for anything the amazing editors and contributors have done to build this site, I nonetheless take enormous pride.

Ancient Jew Review had just officially launched the week before Krista emailed me in 2014 and was still experimenting its possibilities. Its archives are now too massive to plumb in their entirety, but early offerings included authors reflecting on their recent publications, brief video interviews with scholars about their “past and future projects” (no longer available at AJR, but still archived on their short-lived YouTube site), introductions to major topics in the field, and “weekly roundups” of news, conferences, and other online publications of interest to AJR’s growing audience. They also used their social media accounts to point readers to other sites and events, and occasionally live-blogged conferences.

Over time the categories of offerings at AJR have changed and expanded (I also note that, since that initial email from Krista in 2014, I have not seen any references to the Ancient Jew Review). They have, I think wisely, given up on live-blogging and keeping up with proliferating social media formats (although it is briefly amusing to wonder what AJR TikTok might look like). AJR remains at heart that most straightforward, yet enduring, online artifact: a website, continually sponsoring and promoting its own original textual-visual content.

If you look at the top of the page today you’ll see the main categories are Articles, which further breaks down into Dissertations, Essays, Conversations, Publication Reviews, Retrospectives, and Unexpected Influences; Forums; Pedagogy; Reviews; and the newest addition to the AJR stable: Podcast, featuring interviews conducted by Mike Motia for the New Books Network with authors of recent books on late antiquity. Some early types of contributions remain constant, particularly the reflections on new publications (by the authors themselves or in the style of review essays). Early on AJR developed some vital and original content that they still excel in, such as spotlighting recent dissertations and showcasing the amazing and innovative pedagogy practiced by our colleagues around the world. The speed of web publication means keeping up with new work and ideas in real time, rather than waiting through the lag-time of traditional print media.

AJR has, from its very beginnings, also been a site for metacritical reflection on our disciplines and their goals and boundaries. One of the very first AJR posts concerned its name. Entitled “What’s in a Name? The Great Nomenclature Debate” (with a somewhat cheeky URL), it begins: “When we, three overly opinionated young scholars, sat down to brainstorm about a new exciting web platform, the last thing we thought we would get stuck on was what to call it.” As they point out, the simple act of naming “would potentially ally us with one group of scholars and against another, despite our general preference for nuance.”

After playing around with ioudaios as a possible name, they rejected it for the simple reason that a random sample of friends and colleagues all spelled it differently. “We intend this site to be academically rigorous, on the cutting edge, but also entirely accessible,” they note. A potentially gate-keeping name (they also contemplated yehudi or yehudaye) might suggest rigor but it would not be accessible. Ancient Jew Review is, as they note, easy to abbreviate and easy to remember (it rhymes!). It suggests broad swathes of content (“ancient Jews”) but also attempts at synthesis and packaging for diverse audiences (“review”).

In August 2016, AJR’s nomenclature question came up again. I received an email from the four editors (the three founding editors, now joined by Erin Galgay Walsh). They noted that one goal in launching the site was to disrupt disciplinary boundaries, particularly between Jewish studies and cognate fields such as early Christian studies, biblical studies, and classics. “Moving into our third year,” they wrote, “we think we would like to more clearly emphasize that our goal is not to limit but to broaden our materials. Therefore we are thinking of transitioning our name to Ancient Studies Review.” They were seeking my opinion on the matter.

I replied the same day. I began by noting that, from a branding perspective, they might lose something by replacing “Ancient Jew” (which I thought was “more specific, but still very dynamic” and “capacious”) with “Ancient Studies” which had a fuzzier scope. They had already put nearly three years into Ancient Jew Review, and it seemed they risked losing momentum by changing names (to one that didn’t rhyme!).

But I also offered an intellectual perspective on the value of keeping the Jew in Ancient Jew Review. I opined that “one of the motivating impulses of this site [is] to rethink what antiquity looks like by demarginalizing Jews and Judaism.” Publishing pieces on early Christianity, the Bible, Islam, or other aspects of antiquity from a Jewish center has a salutary influence on a discipline saturated in Christian-centric language and themes. “A website on ‘early Christianity’ publishing pieces on ancient Judaism seems like old news,” I wrote. “But incorporating other ancient studies into Ancient Jew Review performs a more complicated, and I think more promising kind of role reversal.”

Eight years later I stand by that sentiment; given that we all still regularly tune into Ancient Jew Review and not some bigger and baggier tent in which, potentially, that Jewish center has drifted back to the margins, the editorial leaders seem to continue to agree with me.

What does the future hold for Ancient Jew Review? I hope it continues to remain both rigorous and creative, valuable to scholars and accessible to civilians. It is a site where I have written (and now spoken) about my recent book projects, discussed exciting new work on “Blackness and the Bible” with Nyasha Junior, reviewed a book on a “scandalous gospel,” and confessed how eight-year old Andrew was indelibly marked by D’Aulaires’ Greek Myths. I find it a congenial and responsive place to think about antiquity and religion and routinely recommend folks consider publishing there. I regularly put AJR content on my course syllabi. When one of the editors asks me if I’d like to contribute (as with this retrospective piece), my answer remains the same as it was ten years ago: “yes, and.”

As I look back over ten years of AJR, I marvel at the lightning that Krista, Simcha, and Nathan captured in a bottle. They succeeded in creating an intellectual commons that remains thoughtful and accessible, reliable yet innovative. That the editors have succeeded in the precarious climate of higher education in the U.S. is even more remarkable, but we should not lose sight of that precarity. Two of the founding editors are full-time faculty (Krista has recently been tenured); the third, however, has left the academy. The website continues to run on the donated labor of its editors and writers, a volunteer community of the mind.

I encourage as many of us as possible to continue to support this endeavor in whatever ways we can. If you are a working scholar at any stage, from graduate student to emerita, full or part time, consider submitting your work to AJR or reaching out to one of the editors to discuss developing an essay, crafting a review, or sharing your pedagogical brilliance. If life has taken you away from regular engagement with scholarship, I urge you to consider AJR a place where you can continue to derive intellectual sustenance and community at your own pace, one of the few remaining spaces that does not put up monetary or institutional roadblocks to access but remains free and open to all. You and I do not know what the academic landscape will look like in 2034, but it is my fervent hope that vibrant virtual spaces like AJR will continue to welcome the conscientious and curious student of ancient religions to join in its mission of exploration, collaboration, and better understanding of life in antiquity.

Andrew S. Jacobs is a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School and author most recently of Gospel Thrillers and The Life of Thecla.